I’ve also made a few changes to the previous post in this series as I tried my best to wrap my head around depth charts, so take a peak if you wish.

It’s important to note that these depth charts do take a little bit of guessing based on games played and time on ice. Trying to piece together who played where, and where everyone should officially be slotted in each teams depth, is a bit of a headache. I did my best to paint as accurate a picture as possible of each team in their breakout seasons.

Also worth noting is that neither Lowetide and Willis attempted to project any major injuries, the likes of which many of the rebuilding teams did see over the course of their breakout seasons. That sort of thing is way too difficult to predict, and so both writers left them out for the purposes of their exercises. They did, however, attempt to account for minor injuries and roster changes and that was reflected in each player’s GP, which has been listed in their posts.

All that said, the numbers that we’re arriving at and comparing in this post are approximations. They give us a bit of an idea of how successfully rebuilt teams performed at certain positions in their breakout seasons, and how the Oilers could potentially stack up in comparison.I’m choosing to leave it at that. I could have further projected everyone over a full 82 game season to try and do away with the GP problem, but ultimately that would have only led to more approximations.

In Conclusion

The Oilers have actual depth on the wing–an abundance of offensive talent. Some of Lowetide’s and Willis’ projections could easily be surpassed (I’m looking at you, Nail).

While, in the previous post, we saw that the Oilers are likely to lag behind other rebuilt teams at centre, the wing corps should create more than enough offence to pick up the slack on the scoresheet.

As Jonathan Willis has mentioned in his projection series, he believes that the Oilers are capable of scoring like a playoff-calibre team. I tend to agree.

The question were all asking is: will it be enough?

I’ll look at the defence in the next post.

Shameless Self-Promotion

Long before I ever blogged about the Oilers, I was writing songs and playing music for people in YEG and now YVR. This week, my label and I released the first track from my upcoming full-length album, set to come out in September. I’ve posted the audio player below.